About an hour's drive from New York, the Corwin House sits in hilly woodland high above the Saugatuck River. Completed by Richard Neutra in 1956, it is one of only three houses the architect built in Connecticut. Architectural designer Aziz Osko has updated the house, revisiting details from Neutra's original design that were never built.
The commission began when Betty and Henry Corwin asked Neutra whether he could recommend an East Coast architect working in a similar style. Neutra was so taken with the wooded site above the river that he took on the commission himself.
IFC Model / KUBUS360. Image Courtesy of Vectorworks
Building Information Modeling has made it possible to attach an enormous amount of information to each element of a design. A wall can carry its fire resistance class and its cost group, and later even the maintenance information a facility manager will need. That possibility creates a temptation: if the model can hold more data, it should. In the process, an important question of efficiency can get lost: does the project actually need this information, and does it need it now?
For architects, BIM is often described as a "single source of truth." Every additional property, however, adds work, coordination, and maintenance, and information entered too early or without a clear purpose can quickly become outdated. What matters is having the right information for the decisions being made at each stage of the project. The Stuttgart-based firm KUBUS360 made that question central to its work on an administrative complex in Baden-Württemberg (Germany).
Where rivers, reservoirs, and rainfall can no longer be relied upon consistently, water is increasingly being sought in the atmosphere. Fog, atmospheric humidity, and condensation each offer different ways of collecting it. When architecture begins to collect water from the air, surfaces, structures, and open spaces become part of the water system.
According to UNICEF, Jordan's National Water Strategy estimates that each person has access to only about 61 cubic meters of renewable water per year, far below the 500 cubic meters commonly used as a threshold for absolute water scarcity. Around half of the population receives piped water only once a week, while groundwater is being extracted faster than many aquifers can naturally recharge.
The buildings and construction sector accounts for around 39% of global CO₂ emissions and nearly 50 per cent of global material extraction. Operational carbon emissions which are associated with the energy consumed to run the buildings also rose by 1% to 9.9 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2024, even as building energy use intensity (EUI) has improved. These figures point to persistent gaps in the way buildings are designed, constructed and upgraded. One important area for closing those gaps is the building envelope insulation, which remains central to controlling energy demand, improving thermal resilience and reducing carbon emissions.
In many Asian cities, the summer climate can increasingly be experienced from a distance. In Hong Kong, it is possible to move from an apartment tower through a podium mall, enter the Mass-Transit-Railway system (MTR), arrive beneath another commercial complex, and continue through enclosed footbridges or underground passages while encountering remarkably little of the atmosphere outside. Heat, humidity, rain, and seasonal variation remain present, but they can be largely bypassed through a continuous network of conditioned interiors.
Over several decades, air-conditioning has expanded from a technology for cooling individual rooms into an infrastructure capable of producing an alternative urban environment. This has been particularly visible in parts of East Asia and South East Asia, where transit-oriented development frequently combines railway stations, shopping centres, housing, offices, and other everyday services within interconnected complexes. The Railway plus Property model has helped institutionalize this relationship between transport and development, creating districts where movement through the city is often inseparable from movement through privately managed interiors.
The most innovative and impactful design projects arise from the intersection of different fields. The architecture community has always borrowed from, or been inspired by, other forms of cultural production such as film, photography, literature, and theatre. In the theatricality of Baroque churches and the cinematic sequences of contemporary museums, architects have looked beyond the building itself to understand how space can shape a story and construct an experience.
Worldbuilding takes this one step further. Instead of designing only the architecture of a place, it asks architects to establish the social rules, narratives, technologies, economies, atmospheres, behaviors, and relationships that make that place believable. Rather than beginning with, "What should this building look like?", worldbuilding suggests beginning with, "In what kind of world would this building make sense?"
In most architectural projects, vertical circulation is expressed as a purely functional element, tucked away behind fire-rated doors or an elevator core. However, sometimes architects also use spirals when trying to resolve site elevation changes. Given the right scale, these elements allow for a more artistic formal expression that serves both utilitarian and aesthetic purposes without relying on mechanical lifts or stairwells. Structural systems like cantilevered steel trusses and reinforced concrete decks allow these spiral elements to extend outward as sheltered entry canopies or wind around open central atriums. Functionally, these circulation paths may be expressed in several ways: as stairs like the Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia, or as ramps, which can offer the possibility to reduce mobility barriers for visitors. In both cases, the spiral can provide smooth transitions across varied floor levels while maintaining an unobstructed line-of-sight throughout the program.
Unlike buildings, which are anchored to foundations and respond to climate from a fixed position, yachts are designed for constant movement and change. Interiors sway with the vessel, light changes by the minute, humidity is a permanent design condition, and every kilogram influences performance. Designing for the sea therefore requires architects, naval architects, engineers, and interior designers to solve questions that rarely exist on land: how can space remain calm while everything around it is in motion?
As architectural projects grow more complex and requirements evolve, the ability to iterate quickly is increasingly important to the design process. For Bellway, one of the UK's largest homebuilders, faster design iteration and visualization have become key to meeting these demands. It is not just a way to present finished designs, but also a tool for testing ideas, communicating options, and making decisions earlier in the development process.
The team led by engineering and technology group Sener, in collaboration with UK-based architecture practice RSHP and Valencia-based ERRE, has been selected to design the new ValenciaCentral Station in Spain. The proposal was chosen by Adif Alta Velocidad's Evaluation Committee following a competition for a new intermodal rail hub integrating high-speed, commuter, metro, tram, bus, taxi, and active mobility connections. The new infrastructure will be coordinated with the planned Central Park, the Access Canal project, and the future through tunnel. The scope also includes the refurbishment of the historic Valencia Nord Station, a designated Site of Cultural Interest, while preserving its architectural and urban heritage.
Historically, the way we design has been closely linked to the way we build. Architecture moved through physical testing, trial and error, projection drawings, mock-ups, and physical models: each introducing a new layer of abstraction, but still remaining tied to material, scale, and construction. The introduction of CAD significantly changed this dynamic. At first, it was largely understood as the computerization of precise geometry for construction. Over time, however, digital tools moved earlier into the design process, replacing sketching, physical trial and error, model-making, and other forms of thinking that had once kept scale and material close at hand.
The lineage of architectural design can therefore be understood, in part, as an evolution of abstractions. Some have been extraordinarily productive. Plans and sections, for example, isolate particular dimensions of architecture while still allowing the mind to reconstruct the whole. They flatten, cut, and reduce, but they do not abandon the building. Through the combination of drawings, one can understand rooms, circulation, structure, openings, and spatial relationships without becoming lost in the complexity of the project. Their abstraction is disciplined because it remains tied to an architectural reality that must eventually be measured, built, and inhabited.
The original promise of BIM (Building Information Modeling) went far beyond the three-dimensional representation of a building. Its ambition was to turn the model into a coordinated information structure, in which geometry, components, systems, and data remained connected as the project evolved. Changes to one element could be reflected across corresponding plans, sections, elevations, and quantities; clashes between different disciplines could be identified before construction; and information associated with building components could follow the project through different stages of its life cycle.
Architects are trained to choose materials, compare their properties, and decide how they should be used. Some practices are taking on a different task: developing the material itself.
For Material Cultures, BC architects, and Studio Ossidiana, this can begin with hemp grown for construction, earth excavated from building sites, or mixtures of concrete, pigment, stone, and shells. Their work connects material research with processing, fabrication, and construction.
Craftsmanship carries the traces of those who shaped it, revealing how materials respond to different techniques and even offering clues about the tools used to create them. Within the architectural experience, however, craftsmanship can be expressed not only through materials and structures but also through space itself. Seeking to deepen and learn from the connections between design and execution, amass studio has explored the translation of informal, everyday construction methods into spatial systems across several of its projects. By integrating mechanisms, materials, structures, and furniture, the studio creates new spatial narratives in which the dialogue between the handcrafted and the industrial becomes mutually reinforcing. Beyond craftsmanship itself, then, why not make visible the processes that bring it into being?
In 1968, the furniture designer and RCA professor David Pye published The Nature and Art of Workmanship, a book built around a distinction between "workmanship of risk" and the "workmanship of certainty." Pye was not writing about architecture, and despite how the phrase gets used today, he was not really writing about hands versus machines either. He pointed out that a printing press, entirely mechanical, still depends on someone judging the ink and the register, while a woodturner working a lathe by hand can follow a template closely enough that almost nothing is left to chance.
Workmanship of risk, in Pye's definition, is any process where the outcome is not fixed in advance but depends on the judgment, dexterity, and attention the maker exercises while the work is still underway. Workmanship of certainty is the opposite condition, as the result is settled before production begins, locked into a jig, a mold, or a program, so that everything downstream is execution. Pye was careful to note that neither mode is inherently superior and that a numerically controlled machine, calibrated to leave room for drift, can sit closer to risk than a hand tool run to a fixed template.
Second Prize Winner: A stair, a spiral, or a park. Image Courtesy of Buildner
Buildner has announced the results of its third edition Architect's Stair international architecture ideas competition. The event invited designers to reflect on one of architecture's oldest and most symbolic elements: the stair. Beyond its functional role as a connector of levels, the stair was positioned here as a medium of architectural storytelling—an invitation to explore ideas of procession, sequence, space, and form.
The center of a plan is never simply empty space. Once rooms and routes begin to organize around it, the center starts to structure the entire plan. It may contain a courtyard, a stair, a garden, or a shared room. It can also preserve something already present on the site or support a process that architecture does not fully control. What occupies this position determines how the surrounding spaces are arranged, connected, and used.
In A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein describe shared spaces as most effective when they sit at the center of gravity of everyday life and remain connected to the routes people use most. Their argument suggests that a center matters not because it occupies the geometric middle, but because the surrounding rooms, paths, and activities give it spatial weight. The projects included here extend that idea beyond communal space, showing how the center can organize circulation, collective use, environmental systems, and the relationship between architecture and what already exists on the site.
Designed by the 3XN, B+H Architects, and Zhubo Design consortium, the Shenzhen Natural History Museum has opened to the public in Shenzhen, China. Covering more than 100,000 square meters, the institution is the largest natural history museum in South China and among the largest recently completed museums of its kind worldwide. Developed as part of Shenzhen's expanding cultural infrastructure, the project brings together exhibition, research, education, and public space within a single civic destination. 3XN led the architectural design, B+H Architects served as lead consultant, executive architect, and landscape architect, and Zhubo Design provided local technical expertise and regulatory coordination throughout the project's development.
